Indy Telecom & Industrial Media

An excellent piece by Robert J. Moore of RJ Metrics called Twitter Data Analysis: An Investor’s Perspective that goes into how a potential investor would perform analytics on a platform like Twitter before investing.

With the use of some very basic statistics that’s easily available through Twitter’s API, he performs a very interesting cohort analysis of user activity and engagement activity.

Fascinating stuff. A few thoughts from my end –

• How could this be monetized based on user preferences, demographics (those of users & followers) etc?
• What will be needed to encouraged people to tweet more?  I’ve been on Twitter for a long time, but I’ve less than 10 tweets. Surprisingly, I’ve 45 followers.
• What could be done about bots? More importantly, how could user credibility be built (ratings, karma, community moderation etc)?
• On the same note, how about differentiating corporate users? E.g. Google’s official Twitter channel vs. that of their fans (and detractors, of course).

I particularly liked ~7:36 and ~18:18.

Interesting new technology called Siftables showcased at TED Talks.

When I checked into my American Airlines flight on Monday, it offered me the chance to mail the boarding pass to a bunch of different places.

But what was interesting was that there was an additional field that was shown but disabled. This was the option to mail the boarding pass to my mobile device.

And this morning, I checked in for another flight (yes, I spend more time at airports than anywhere else — welcome to the story of my life). However, I now noticed the ability to mail the boarding pass to my mobile device. Of course, being the geek that I am, I had to give it a go.

The TSA checkpoint was a breeze — they have a little reader that goes green when you run it through. And the agent at the other end of the metal detector didn’t even want to see it — he just asked me to put it through the x-ray screener. Of course, I’ve heard all kinds of stories — some TSA agents step through, see the phone, then ask you to run the phone through x-ray; others just ask you to hand the phone over to them, and then let you walk through.

And the American boarding gates also have readers, similar to the ones that the TSA have.

It is almost surreal, and I for one welcome the paperless tickets. Welcome to the future — there may not be any flying cars, but there certainly is an easier way to go around in flying planes.

Reality Update

So, at the boarding gate, the person looks at my phone and goes, “Uh oh… oh no!” And then, of course, she asks me to scan the phone, and it doesn’t work. She asks me if I have a paper ticket (which I didn’t). At which point, she sighs and asks me for my name and searches for my reservation, and manually lets me in. Well, nobody said the future is perfect.

Excellent talk by Juan Enriquez on the current economic crisis. A very insightful and refreshing take on the current state of affairs, and how we got here.

Juan Enriquez (2008) Pop!Tech Pop!Cast from PopTech on Vimeo.

(Courtesy Paul Kedrosky)

Alienware recently came up with an extremely cool (and alien looking) curved monitor that’s about 3 feet long. And of course, curved.

It uses some really cool Digital Light Processing (DLP) technology and has a resolution of 2880×900. It’s back-lit by LEDs, and you can see the seams between the four monitors making up the monitor. Apparently, those will go away in the final version. Even more interestingly, this monitor supposedly has amazing response times (supposedly 0.02ms, according to Gizmodo).

Can you hear me say w00t!?

Today, I finally gave into temptation and bought myself a Blackberry Curve 8320. It wasn’t exactly cheap, but hey, it was long due and was totally worth it (and I got one hell of a discount).

It’s quite a beauty, sleek, small and very easy to use. And it comes loaded with all the cool features — wireless capable, a 2 MP camera, Bluetooth 2.0, built-in multimedia player, 320 x 240 QVGA display, 64 MB internal and of course, a microSD expansion slot, 312MHz Intel processor and a whole slew of other features.

Other interesting things include such things as Blackberry Maps and a kick-ass multimedia player. And I really really love the trackball. Other things that I like about this phone is that it has a very convenient mute key (so you can have it turned on when you’re flying but it won’t try accessing any network) and a push-to-talk button on the side. The display also automatically adjusts the lighting levels by sensing its surroundings, which is really quite useful.

Sadly, it’s not quite 3G (2.75G, maybe? ) and there is no HSDPA or GPS, but hey, I am not complaining.

So yes, I am stricken with the phone fever.

The Bloomberg terminal is to the financial world what Windows is to Joe User (and what Linux is to the geeks).

And just the other day, I came across an interesting article describing the redesign of the Bloomberg Terminal.

As a challenge, they asked three design companies to come up with various redesigns of the interface. The chosen three are all top design firms in their own right – thehappycorp, IDEO and Ziba Design.

I looked at all three designs and here are my thoughts.

I could not resist putting up this picture of my three little Hexbug critters together.

They are such mean things — they try avoiding one another but in the process, end up hitting one another anyway. Almost makes me want to write a program to see what a colony of a million of these would look like.

So, I liked the little critters so much that I decided to go ahead and buy some more Hexbugs for myself.

The first one I had was Bravo and these are called Alpha and Delta. Since I have three, I hope to collect two more and have the entire collection. That way, I can probably make them fight amongst themselves.

(Does anyone else think that they are called Hexbugs but there are only five of them? They do have six legs, though.)

And for some reason, these things remind me of those Replicator bugs from Stargate SG-1.

Meet the newest member of our family! Lana just got me a new Hexbug toy as a random gift.

Hexbugs are fun little robotic bugs that can sense the surroundings through their antennas and find their way around. Not only that, but when you make a loud noise, they can hear and react to the noise. This lets you control where they go. Interesting little buggers!

Q: What’s worse than one Bell Labs guy working on trying to fix the phone?

A: Two Bell Labs guys trying to fix the phone, duh.

And of course, my favourite:

Q: How many Bell Labs guys does it take to change a light-bulb?

A: None – they just hold all the patents to it.

After installing Edgy, I figured I’d go ahead and install Beryl – an open-source 3d Window Manager that totally rocks.

While this took some doing, it was totally worth it, as the screenshots below will attest to (and when you are done looking at those, you should have a look at some of the YouTube videos on Beryl).

Yes, I am back to having multiple posts in a single blog entry — I figured that this is better than having several dozen smaller entries.

DemoCamp Cincinnati

Thursday evening was DemoCamp Cincinnati, which was quite fun. A bunch of folks showed up and we had a couple of talks, one of them by a new startup called Mercury Grove. They presented their neat product called Collab which was rather interesting. They seem to have some very interesting people working there, and I just found out that they have a blog, too.

Click to see more pictures from DemoCamp Cincinnati

Ubuntu Adventures on a Dell e1405

So, I decided to upgrade my Dell notebook from Dapper to Edgy Eft. I have a Dell e1405, which like all notebooks, has the most obscure devices you can ever find (and ergo, is the hardest to find device drivers for). Now, I could not get a lot of things to work on Dapper, so I figured that Edgy Eft would be better.

So I received an email today from Flickr telling me I would need to merge my Yahoo! account with my Flickr username, and that they have set a deadline for doing this. Apparently, if I did not, I will lose my Flickr account.

Now, Flickr is a great service. It rocks. It has a ton of cool features that people love and more importantly, it has a wonderful community. And I signed up for Flickr before they were a part of Yahoo!, so I have what’s called an “Old Skool” address.

But here is the problem – I am not a big fan of Yahoo!’s UI and nor am I a big fan of Yahoo!’s customer support. Secondly, my Yahoo! account tends to get a lot of spam, and sometimes I wonder if they even have a spam-blocker in place.

Ever since Yahoo! acquired Flickr, I knew that this was going to happen eventually. However, I just kept hoping that it would not, or that they would let the older members keep their accounts the way they are.

Sadly, that was not the case. Quite honestly, I am a little annoyed and upset at this incident. And as it turns out, so are the majority of “Old Skool” Flickr users.

Problems with merging accounts

So, as a Flickr (and an occasional Yahoo!) user, the following are a list of problems that I see with merging the two.

• Usability and convenience issues: You see, you are asking your original user-base (those that made you popular and and helped you become big) to do something that a large majority do not want to. This is like saying, “Oh thank you for being the first guys to help us out. To show our thanks, here, jump through a hoop, out of a plane and put these chains around your neck.”

• Signing up for a Yahoo! account: You see, a lot of Flickr users do not have a Yahoo! account. So, when you try merging without a Yahoo! account, you are asked to register for a new account. Not only that, it is usually hard to find a username that matches your Flickr name. In fact, it is almost impossible to find a Yahoo! username that you’d like because almost all of them are taken. So, you end up with an obscure Yahoo! username. And today, it is yet another username/password combination you will have to remember, one that you never asked for (and probably a complicated one at that, considering how hard it is to get a Yahoo! username of your choice).

• What if you have anothe Flickr account associated with your Yahoo! account?: If you have two Flickr accounts, one associated with your Yahoo! account and one from before, you cannot merge the two. So, I ended up deleting the Flickr account that was associated with my Yahoo! account and merged my regular one with the Yahoo! one. Now imagine if I had a few gigs of photographs — this would have been hell.

• Personal Information: As a lot of Flickr members have indicated, signing up for Yahoo! requires personal information. Sure, you can lie about it, but that’s not the point. Why are you being asked for something that you did not want to do in the first place? The way I see it, you are asking your existing customers to do something that is very clearly distasteful to them.

• Alienating a userbase: The userbase of Old Skool Flickr is from folks who have been using it for a while, the guys who helped make Flickr big. And this is the core group that Yahoo! is alienating with this move.

• Sharing of accounts: With Flickr, you could share your account with someone else, say a friend. But what if you had an existing Yahoo! account? Giving the keys to your Flickr account is one thing, giving the keys to your email account is something else.

User feedback — Listening to your users is important

Ideally, Flickr/Yahoo! should have consulted its userbase before this move. But that did not happen — a quick look at the forums and some of the messages there sums up the situation quite well.

“That’s really dumb. I don’t like yahoo and I don’t like my yahoo account. I don’t like anything about yahoo. I didn’t like it that yahoo bought flickr but I was fine with it as long as they didn’t mess with it. Well, now they have. They’re going to slowly destroy what makes this website great, just you wait. Flickr, why did you sell out to such capitalistic pigs? I take pride in being an old skool member. Furthermore, if it’s only 5% of us who still use our old logins then why not let us! If we really want to use yahoo mobile whatever then we’d have switched over by now! Now I have to create a yahoo account with all kinds of numbers because my name is already taken. Thanks!” — JPhilpson

“We signed up early on cause we believed in what Flickr was offering at the time, and the direction it was going in… There are many many other photo services out there, that we chose not to join cause we believed in the community of Flickr…

When Flickr ’sold out’ to Yahoo, they basically turned their backs on those of us that believed in them enough from the beginning to give them money to start/keep going…

The reason we are the minority around here is simple, Flickr forgot about those of us that have supported it from the beginning long ago and have been forcing Y!ID for new members ever since…It’s offensive to be told that we, the ones that helped support this site for so long, are now the reason everyone’s experience is getting worse…

Same rules apply on the Internet as do in real life… ‘Never forget where you came from…’ “– justj

“I’ve seen this before, with LaunchCast and mailing lists, which were great before Yahoo took over and they became unusable.

I’ve invested too much time in Flickr to risk all my work being lost by having to muck about with Yahoo mail.

I don’t want to worry about all my photos being deleted or losing my Flickr friends and all their photos. ” — jovike

(Ed: Incidentally, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that happens — I know several people (with paid Yahoo! e-mail accounts) whose mailboxes were empty one fine morning.)

“It’s pastures new for me. I’ll be letting all my accounts expire rather than put up with more Yahoo-based nonsense. Flickr is the new Starbucks.

Flickr is not the adventure playground it once was. The experimental, alternative vibe it had in the days before Yahoo is long gone. After the buyout was announced there was some question as to whether the new owners would kill the golden goose. It’s been a slow death, one accomplished through a thousand cuts. As jovike says above, the focus should be on the subscribers. But it isn’t. It’s because Yahoo have never had a good grasp of customer service.

My existing photos could live on in cyberspace, marooned but visible to anyone who wants to visit the museum. But the new Flickr would rather reclaim the trivial amount of server space that requires. So my legacy and those of other old timers will just disappear.

So much for posterity and cyber-heritage. And there’s still that old human rights record. And the censorship, both deliberate and accidental. The new Flickr is arbitrary about what it allows, and bumble-footed about fixing mistakes.

So it’s on to pastures new. Someone else will be doing interesting, user-focused photo projects. I can give a startup the benefit of the doubt. But when a company so big gets it so wrong, it’s time to put aside lingering affections and move on. Thanks for the good times. Thanks for the fish. Long Live Flickr.” — flickrthrope

“My wife and I currently share our flickr account. Can we each use our own ID to access our flickr account? Or will we have to share 1 yahoo ID?” — xftwitch

“How are they going to be processing our refunds? I have read enough bad things about them in this forum that I can’t in all good conscience stay with Yahoo. I honestly didn’t know alot of the privacy issues that were raised here. I’m not going to make any useless remarks about yahoo. I just want my money back. How do I do this?” — ceriess

“Having to translate an email/password page is a weak attempt at an excuse. It would be better to at least be honest and say hey, Yahoo bought us, they want this community linked in to their other services. They own us and that’s just the way it is. The sugar coating and fabrication of excuses is even worse than having to actually merge.” –Thomas Hawk

I could go on, but of all the posts, I was able to see very few (if any) that were even vaguely in favour of the switch.

One of the first lessons in usability, business or technology is that you should listen to your users. Yet, Flickr/Yahoo! very clearly did not. In fact, they went ahead and did something that was explicitly distasteful to their users, to the point that some of the pro users want to know if they can get a refund from their account. And others are linking to things such as “A Brief History of Yahoo! Acquisitions“.

And one wonders why Yahoo! is faltering.

It’s a mistake only when you refuse to correct it

Flickr has given its users a deadline, however there still is time for Yahoo! to stop and correct this, particularly considering the amount of negative user feedback that is being generated.

Flickr/Yahoo! still have the time to go back on this, but I doubt if they will. Given Yahoo!’s track record in such things, I really doubt anything will change. Some will stay, some will move on but Flickr has already made the first move of screwing over its users.

That cannot be a good thing. Secondly, lot of the Flickr users that are complaining are Pro members — this means that they are not just users, but they are customers.

Customer is King, and the King is not happy

Dear Yahoo! and Flickr,

The customer is king. Despite everything that you may believe, the customer determines whether or not you stay in business. And nobody is more important than those that helped you get where you are today. The least you can do is listen to them.

Go on, go on to the Flickr forums and read the posts. If you still do not care for what your users have to say, it is more than a tad unfortunate.

There is another company I know that actually listens to its users.

I was just going through the BarCamp pages today when noticed that there was a DemoCamp in Cincinnati on February 1st.

So folks, if you live in Cincinnati and have nothing to do on a Thursday evening, head out to McFadden’s in downtown Cincinnati and join the DemoCamp.

Traditionally, BarCamps and DemoCamps consist of short technology demos, presentations and discussions. Ever since I moved here, I’ve wondered when one would show up in Cincinnati, so I’m rather looking forward to this.

Assuming that I am in town then, of course.

So, I finally got a new tripod, from Amvona, one of their ultralight models. My first order of business, of course, was to try out some candidates for HDR photography.

I present to you a couple of the results – click to view the larger images:

I’m still new at this stuff, so please forgive me if these don’t really look like the HDR images that you may see on some professional photographer’s website.

Here is a stop motion video of a church right outside my apartment in downtown Cincinnati: